April 1917 Quotes

“the whole of that day (and the day before) the government had not involved itself at all in the unrest on the streets, leaving the Executive Committee to pick up the pieces. It had not even done anything to ensure its own preservation: things would take their course. And now they were exchanging looks, in barely concealed amazement that they had managed to survive those two days and come out unscathed. And now they were in session.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, April 1917: The Red Wheel, Node IV, Book 1

“half-a-million-strong procession from the windows, or when stepping out on to Nevsky Prospect: there was something terrible about it. The terrible thing was how organized it was, how, at the appointed time on the appointed day, half a million or even more Petersburg residents had paraded along the prescribed streets, in the prescribed direction, in the prescribed ranks—which was quite unnatural! And the singing! Exactly the same songs in a hundred or so different columns, and—the way they were singing! It was monotonous, as if under some compulsion, under a spell: the sound of a new paganism. One of the library’s wits, putting a twist on Kozma Prutkov, had quipped: “Tell me this, if the color red didn’t exist, how would you spot the friends of the people?” The woman in charge of issuing the books: “There’s nothing funny about it. This is the very Acheron flowing—”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, April 1917: The Red Wheel, Node IV, Book 1

“The ministers, after two whirlwind visits to GHQ in late March and early April, five of them each time, published their conclusion: discipline was firming up and no worrying symptoms had been observed among the troops. On the fronts, the crisis point of the revolutionary fever was now past. They hurried to inform the journalists as well. Nekrasov, strangely, told them the ministers had found at GHQ an organization in harmony with the unanimous wish of the people to overturn the old regime. (What did he have in mind? Alekseev himself knew no such organization.)”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, April 1917: The Red Wheel, Node IV, Book 1

“War is not an icon, not a shrine. War is only a means of keeping one’s state safe. And if it’s more useful to your state not to wage war, then you should not wage it.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, April 1917: The Red Wheel, Node IV, Book 1

“because in the major cities of the south three and a half thousand criminals have been released from prison all at once and most have congregated in Odessa. And since the police force there was abolished no one has been protecting people’s property.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, April 1917: The Red Wheel, Node IV, Book 1